TUSCALOOSA | For years whenever I have written about ground-breaking post Civil Rights era black elected officials, I have often had to add the qualifier, “first black elected since Reconstruction” to whatever office I am talking about.

That’s because during the years of Reconstruction, roughly the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1877, when the south was for all practical purposes an occupied country, many blacks, most of them freed slaves, were installed into office by our northern over lords.

As oppressive as things were during Reconstruction (at least for the white population), they became even worse for African Americans with the abrupt end of the period and the implementation of Jim Crow segregation laws that stood until the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s.

I am woefully ignorant of the details of Reconstruction and Jim Crow (what you read above is about all I knew until today) and really need to get up to speed on this part of our history. But in a fascinating story by Ashley Boyd in Sunday’s paper about Tuscaloosa’s Shandy Wesley Jones, who was one of 26 black men elected to the Alabama Legislature following the Civil War, I’ve learned a little bit more of that history.

Rep. Jones only served from 1868 to 1870, but at least now when I mention that former Rep. Bryant Melton, was “the first black elected to the Alabama Legislature from Tuscaloosa County since Reconstruction” when he won a seat in 1982, I’ll know who preceded him by nearly a century.

But in reading Ashley’s piece, I also got to wondering again where the term “Jim Crow” comes from. I had Googled the term before without finding anything but circular definitions — “the laws put in to force following Reconstruction to disenfranchise blacks,” etc. — and stumped more than one learned college professor and southern historian with the question.

But my curiosity pricked by Ashley’s story, I gave it another shot and what do you know, Wikipedia (which I know I had consulted before without satisfaction) had this to say:

“The origin of the phrase ‘Jim Crow’ has often been attributed to ‘Jump Jim Crow‘, a song-and-dance caricature of African Americans performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface, which first surfaced in 1832.. Its origins may, however, precede this production… The term had become an adjective by 1838, and the phrase Jim Crow Law first appeared in the Dictionary of American English in 1904.

“Even before its appearance in the dictionary, at least as early as the 1890s, the phrase ‘Jim Crow Law’ had achieved common usage.”

So there, I feel a bit smarter today.

Here’s Ashley’s story, complete with the picture of Jones you’ll find with this post: